Do you agree - a Free RPG lives on its setting

[Nicephorus]

I think Starglim's view is pretty close to mine. A game needs to instantly suggest what the players should do, or at least one path to take. Potential users need to be able to visualize what it's about to get inspired enough to finish reading the game and possibly play it (Let's face it, maybe a fifth of downloaded games are given a full read through). Mechanics don't always suggest what exactly you'd be doing - that was a hard leap with early Traveller.

Chainsaw Aardvark is also right in that not all setting material is equal. A game can be full of useless trivia. Sometimes, I think it's a bane to free pdf rpgs that they can be as long as they want without worrying about printing limits; the extra fluff can hide the thrust of the game and lack of editorial focus allows meandering writing.

Sales of existing games imply that setting generally trumps rules. e.g. Rifts.

Examples:
"This is a dice pool game where you keep the highest roll. If there are multiples of a value, you can add them together to take as your highest roll. The caveat is that you roll without replacement for an event so taking multiples lowers your pool for future rolls."

"Gareth was married to Gwen but kept seeing Grellen. The bastard king is the offspring of Gareth and Grellen. The Pure One is the evil offspring of Gareth and Gwen. They lived in the same palace as kids and grew to despise each other."

"You're a monster hunter. The best way to kill a monster is with their own essence. So, you're also a monster harvester. The edge of your sword is made from vampire teeth. Your flak jacket is made from mummy wrappings with the ammulets still in place. Careful though, too much monster on you affects your head and, eventually, your whole body. Some of the toughest monsters use to be hunters."

Which one would you rather play? Ok, given the audience of hobbyist designers, probably the first. But I think most players would be more psyched about playing the third.

Depending on how their presented, mechanics can imply quite a bit of setting. I don't recall Pokethulhu having a complex setting but the opening pages and the rules make it clear that you are kids fighting with monsters.

[Bryndon]

[jeffmoore]

[oversoul]

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

[Sanglorian]

Every game system needs a setting because every game system should be designed for that system.

That's how I feel at the moment, at least. I think the most elegant and progressive game design is where every mechanic, every rule, every character option is carefully designed for its intended setting and its intended setting alone.

Generic game systems don't appeal to me. They used to, but as I've found more and more games - and more and more diverse games - I've come to prefer game systems that emulate their setting instead of game systems that can emulate any setting.

Having said that, I'm lumping 'genre' and 'colour' and 'theme' and so on into 'setting'. It would be more accurate to say a good game needs to be focused on a feel, but that feel doesn't necessarily entail a setting.

An example (not from a free game) of targetted design is Houses of the Blooded, where any fight with more than one person is 'Mass Murder'. It's a duel or it's a massacre, with nothing in between. Why? Because duels and war fit the game's feel; skirmishes and muggings don't.

[Wolfboy]

As the co-author of (less a game than a prolonged exercise in GM sadism and transgressive art) I should probably be excluded from this discussion (and then burned at the stake). But behold, I offer my 2 cents' worth anyhow!

I think the most important thing to do (if you want people to actually play your game) is to catch them as fast as you can. It would be better, in my book, to have a setting which is undefined enough to offer players and GMs a bit of freedom to invent stuff, but defined enough to get them going. Probably the bits you should define most are the bits that keep your game on track as far as your vision for how it should play out. For example, if you want wandering monks in ancient China, you probably need to tell people in concrete terms about monks, monasteries and temples and the wilderness - the rest of ancient China could be broad-brushed in enough to give the GM some idea of what they're talking about, but you probably don't need detailed and totally accurate social history.

The system for such a game should deal with the things that monks are liable to encounter, and should probably be pretty detailed as regards martial arts (I'm assuming these are kung fu monks) but doesn't necessarily need a complex mercantile system. I'm a big fan of "one game, one system" or at the very least "one world, one system" because I do think that system alters the "feel" of the whole thing, and that a mechanic that captures people's imagination can draw people in (and vice versa).

[SheikhJahbooty]

I've played both PDQ and Wu Shu with original settings sketched out in the first session, so no, setting is not necessary for a free RPG to get played.

I am however a Talislanta fan and I love reading weird settings, like Rings of Jerusalem. (Feel free to bow, Chainsaw. Feel free to get it from the 1km1kt free game directory, everyone else.)

I'm going to have to agree with Jeff Moore, in that what I like to read in a RPG setting is often not what I can scrounge up people to play. It is easy to get people to play Star Wars. It is impossible to get people to play Tales of the Floating Vagabond. It is easy to get people to play in Forgotten Realms. I've never even heard of anyone getting a Morningstar campaign together.

A bizarre setting might get played if its really over the top bizarre, and the mechanics are weird. I think I know some people I can rope into playing a few sessions of Noumenon with me.